• All posts tagged with "personal"
ם Saturday Night
Posted on August 1, 2008 at 12:26 am
A panic attack is an episode of severe anxiety and dread. The symptoms include palpitations, shortness of breath, and chest pain. There may be dizziness, sweating, numbness or tingling, and shaking. This is an extremely frightening experience, with the person being afraid that he or she is going to die.
From Wikipedia:
Experiencing a panic attack is said to be one of the most intensely frightening, upsetting and uncomfortable experiences of a person’s life. Sufferers of panic attacks report a fear or sense of dying, “going crazy”, or experiencing a heart attack or “flashing vision”, feeling faint or nauseous, or losing control of themselves.
ם Andrew Cuomo Says…
Posted on June 23, 2008 at 12:18 am
From the Office of the New York State Attorney General, with regards to my ordeal this morning:
In emergencies, tenants may make necessary repairs and deduct reasonable repair costs from the rent. For example, when a landlord has been notified that a door lock is broken and willfully neglects to repair it, the tenant may hire a locksmith and deduct the cost from the rent. Tenants should keep receipts for such repairs.
—From the New York Tenant’s Rights Guide.
ם Highway Robbery
Posted on June 22, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Sunday morning. Needed to buy groceries for the week. Strapped on bag, grabbed bike. Tried to leave apartment. Door won’t open. Lock jammed.
Call super. No answer. Call building manager. No answer. Call landlord. No answer. Call landlord’s emergency number. No answer. Leave voicemail. Call locksmith. Finally, an answer.
Locksmith comes. $55 just to show up.
Locksmith drills out my lock. $285.
Locksmith replaces my lock. $400.
Locksmith does… something else? Something locksmithy? $95.
Ah, plus tax. $69.
$904 later, I still don’t have any groceries. Hmph.
ם Oh Hey.
Posted on May 10, 2008 at 8:48 pm
At this point, multiple people have asked why I don’t write anything here anymore. Multiple people in real life, even. Like, at parties and stuff. Didn’t know so many people were following my comings-and-goings on here.
What’s my excuse? Don’t have one. So, I’ll try to start putting things here again. I’ve been Twittering a lot lately, so most of my little one-off things to say have gone there. I’m considering integrating my Tweets into this space, so maybe you’ll start seeing more here.
(Don’t know what Twitter is? Watch Twitter in Plain English, realize it’s awesome, then join and follow me. Or don’t. Choose your own adventure.)
I’ve got some things tucked away in my head to write up, so I’ll be back soon, I promise.
It’s the New Year. (Yeah, yeah, I’m 3 weeks late. So sue me.)
But this isn’t a post about resolutions for 2008. It’s a retrospective on my 2007 resolution.
I’ve always done fairly well academically, but during college I hadn’t ever had a perfect straight-A semester. Since I was going to graduate a semester early, 2007 perfectly contained the last two semesters of my college career, so I made my resolution on December 31st, 2006, that in 2007 I’d get a 4.0 one of those semesters.
Summer of 2007 rolled around, and I came close. Two A’s, two A–’s. 3.85 GPA. Close, but no cigar.
I was down to the wire with only one semester left. But I stuck the landing. Booyah.
2007 Resolution: Completed.
(2008 doesn’t have a traditional resolution, per se. It’s more of a curious project. More on that later.)
I’ve been having some unfortunate ear pain for the past, oh, two months, so I went to the doctor yesterday. This is now my breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime snack:
Gotta catch ‘em all.
(For scale, the blue one’s about the size of a nickel.)
And I was again told by a doctor that I have a surprisingly high tolerance for pain. Booyah.
ם A Powerful Penny
Posted on December 6, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Speaking of the hardware store, I had a profound experience while shopping at the Ace Hardware on West 3rd St. (between 6th Ave and MacDougal).
I had to buy some machine screws and some washers (but not too many of either), and they sell loose ones individually for a few cents a piece. My total was a high-rolling $2.76. I gave the cashier three singles, and she handed me back my receipt and a quarter.
Now, you don’t have to be a math whiz to know that’s not quite right. But, you also don’t have to be an economic mastermind to see what happened: instead of making things a little bit more inconvenient for both of us by giving me the six-coin, two-dimes-and-four-pennies combo, she spotted me the penny and slid me a Mr. Washington (the silver kind, not the paper kind).
No big deal, right? Not quite. It actually made me feel pretty good. I appreciated it. And you know what? I’m going to go back. They’re my hardware store now, and I’m their loyal customer. And if someone else needs to go to the hardware store, well, I’m probably going to give them directions to my friendly neighborhood Ace.
Loyal customers matter. A box of Kleenex only costs a couple of dollars, and no one buys more than a few boxes a year. But to the company, a loyal Kleenex customer is worth about $994 over the course of his or her tissue-buying life. While that’s not a huge amount of money to a corporation like Kimberly-Clark (Kleenex’s parent company), over a broad customer base, that’s the money that keeps Kleenex alive.
As a company, how much would you be willing to pay for that loyalty? Econ 101 tells us Kleenex should be willing to pay anywhere up to $994 for that loyalty. Ace Hardware got my loyalty for a penny.
That’s a very powerful penny.
ם Things I Saw Today…
Posted on November 17, 2007 at 3:20 am
A crazy guy getting into a fight with a fire hydrant. It was a physical fight, not a verbal one.
10/26/07, 5:00 EST — With curls.
10/26/07, 6:30 EST — Sans curls.
Update: I just got a letter from MySpace. Turns out I owe them a nickel for each of those shots.
ם Handy
Posted on October 6, 2007 at 10:18 pm
Tonight, I was having some problems with my belt, so I fixed it!
…with a high-speed electric drill.
